Blissed out & loving it:
Siegel, Fred
BLISSED OUT & LOVING IT THE EIGHTIES & THE DECLINE OF PUBLIC LIFE FRED SIEGEL the past forty years of U.S. history can be divided into periods which were either modern, that is, euphoric about...
...On the other hand, if you fail, you have only yourself to blame...
...There were groups for people afflicted by not only drugs and alcohol, but negativism (negaholics), shopping (shopaholics), sex (sexaholics), video games (videoholics)-you get the idea...
...The liberation of Eastern Europe is truly a world historical event worth celebrating...
...By the early eighties the terms of exchange between work/economic individualism and art/bohemian individualism were reversed...
...Love, with its emphasis on the unique and the uncom-municable, has always been gloriously antisocial, but never before was it so fractious...
...history can be divided into periods which were either modern, that is, euphoric about technology and the progress it delivered, or countermodern, that is, haunted by the price paid for "progress...
...By the late eighties a small industry had developed, devoted to celebrating the sixties by reasserting the supremacy of innocence over experience...
...Abortion is of course the flash point in all this...
...Still, the Woodstock nation has not been without its legacy...
...FRED SIEGEL, who covered the 1988 presidential campaign for Commonweal, is spending the year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton...
...Romance, said Michael Ignatief, became, during the eighties, a mass industry...
...I'm not optimistic as to how the competition will turn out...
...If you have willed it, you can cure it...
...For an increasing number of people it is no longer possible to be both faithful to oneself and married...
...In a society where therapy had already replaced religion as the source of solace, health has now replaced ethics as the measure of morality...
...Bizarre as it may seem in a society already awash in individualism, the primary message of many of these groups has been that people suffer from an excess of selflessness...
...Follow it, that is, into your own private Utopia...
...In Europe and to an even greater extent, Asia, the promise of technology has flourished in societies that have retained a considerable degree of their premodern cohesiveness...
...The deepest strand of American culture, its radical individualism, now found its outlet in the return of the pre-New Deal hero, the entrepreneur...
...Unlike our European and Asian counterparts, we seem to have largely given up, at least domestically, on the idea of shared national purpose...
...The "creative" people, the nonconformists, expressed themselves through their art, or what has since become indistinguishable from it, their lifestyle...
...It was one area where the U.S...
...Other polls show that while people see a widespread moral breakdown going on around them, their own private satisfaction is at an all-time high...
...what remains of adult culture is suffused with movies and songs about little else...
...The transformation of the term yuppie into an epithet was a belated recognition that radical chic might not have been all that it was cracked up to be...
...Hoffman, like Huey Newton (murdered at the hands of the drug-dealing thugs he trafficked with) was part of the chorus that had called for an end to bourgeois society...
...Roughly speaking, the "fifties" (the period from 1948 to 1963) was modern...
...Reagan and Bush have of course contributed to the sense of well-being by financing record levels of consumption on a mountain of debt, a foundation every bit as shaky as self-cures for cancer...
...Campbell's mythmaking, a somewhat more sophisticated version of what in Star Wars was called "the force," served up a mismash of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Jung, and Eastern religions...
...The family, he argued, was where the individual learned the altruism necessary for public life...
...We may no longer believe in justice or democracy because these imply an actor called 'society' whose identity is continually fragmented...
...Whatever else it did, such popular therapy seems to have had the effect, justified or not, of making people feel better about themselves...
...And to a frightening degree their wish has come true...
...Atwater, a self-described "libertarian good old boy," skirts the abortion issue by telling audiences that he has "an obsession with individual freedom...
...The country needed to be taught self-love...
...It is this truce, this lull in the war of the competing individ-ualisms, which has allowed analysts like Francis Fukuyama to talk in Hegelian overtones about the triumph of the West and "The End of History" (The National Interest, Summer 1989...
...economy could still compete...
...Though tarnished, the Aquarian ideal, consistent as it is with America's underlying fascination with the care and grooming of the self, took on a new life in the eighties...
...By contrast, the "sixties," from Kennedy's assassination to 1978, focused on paying the environmental price for the plastics and pesticides, and the biological one for overdosing on penicillin, while recoiling at the widespread prosperity and mass culture that were producing "plastic" people...
...Instead, assuming in the manner of the market that personal preference is all, they simply indulge in horse trading...
...Poll after poll indicates that while Americans thought the country was going to hell in a handbasket, they personally are doing just fine, maybe even better than ever...
...The programs' host, Bill Moyers, wrapped the ideas of the right-wing misanthrope Joseph Campbell in a mantle of respectability...
...For instance, he thought marriage begins in contract, but that it is precisely a contract to transcend the standpoint of contract...
...One sign of that decline is that, as the political philosopher Thomas Spragens notes, politicians and activists have largely given up the discipline of trying to persuade one another...
...Under the new norm-the marriage of uncertain duration-romantic love between individuals has been pitted against self-love and generally lost...
...The catharsis that once required months or even years of therapy is now compressed into an hour and televised four, five, six times a day on shows with Phil, Oprah, Geraldo, and Sally, not to mention their radio imitators...
...The personal computer and the fax transformed the office while the VCR and the microwave reordered family life...
...The higher selfishness was given elaborate justification on PBS's most popular series of the decade, "The Power of Myth...
...This time, of course, the job will be done right...
...While it is by no means clear that Bush will be able to negotiate those shoals, his top political strategist, Republican National Committee Chair Lee Atwater, has been laying out a rhetorical strategy designed to do just that...
...For many Americans that private Utopia has consisted of a walled and gated condominium community sealed off from the disintegration around them...
...But we do believe in the right to love...
...The classic sixties challenge to "progress" asked: "How is it that we can put a man on the moon, but can't eliminate poverty...
...Love was the last remaining Utopia...
...Campbell spoke out against the finicky concerns of an ethical life as a hindrance to experiencing "the rapture of being alive...
...The proliferation of drugs, crime, unmarried mothers, and the mentally ill wandering our streets testifies to a moral deregulation whose effects are all too clear...
...Work, said the countermodernists, robotized people...
...New Age medical gurus explain that cancer is really only a form of cellular despair...
...Fukuyama's inspiration, Hegel, was prescient about the centrifugal dangers of an asocial, amoral individualism...
...The sixties encounter group has been institutionalized and televised...
...Politically the odd men out in this truce have been the cultural conservatives on the right and the economic egalitarians on the left...
...A country that has forgotten where it came from is not well equipped to decide where it is going...
...In a reworking of the old Protestant scheme of the self-made man and the self-saved soul, self-healing became popularized...
...And one way to achieve the self-love is to cut yourself off entirely from your past, "by healing the child within," that is, eliminating the middleman and "repar-enting" yourself...
...If so, given a divorce rate unprecedented in the history of the world and the high cost paid by the children involved, we can expect public life to continue to decline...
...Perhaps no countermodern theme was more telling in the sixties than the critique of work in a mass production society...
...In short, he tries to outflank the abortion issue without directly offending right-to-life voters...
...But its glow has obscured the cracks within our own realm, or what Daniel Bell has called the cultural contradictions of capitalism...
...Well before Eisenhower set the dominant political tone, the decade was defined by the promise of plastics, pesticides, penicillin, and polio vaccine, with televisions, freezers and washing machines thrown in for the average home...
...In the eighties we began to make the best of our narcissism by marketing it around the world through rock videos and teen movies...
...But don't feel too bad, under another variant of medicalized morality you can always join one of the proliferating therapy groups, which grew as rapidly in the 1980s as Protestant sects had in the 1840s...
...It is your job to feel good about yourself, regardless...
...One of the reasons for Bush's enormous popularity to date is that he has not only nurtured this truce, by gently backing away from the conservative cultural agenda, but he has tried to turn the truce into the permanent basis for the Republican future...
...The innocence industry notwithstanding, the plagues of the eighties cast a retrospective shadow over the glories of the Aquarian age...
...A self-described "sixties radical" who had entered medicine for the best of motives described the change to me: The staff in the New York hospital emergency room where he works divides the world between the violent druggies-the "rude, mean, narcissistic dirtballs" who return again and again to the emergency room crowding out the other patients-and the "citizens"-people who do not use drugs...
...The eighties-I skip the "seventies" because culturally speaking it didn't happen-brought a return to the romance of progress...
...For others it is the flight into "romantic" love...
...Moreover, the newly enriched of the eighties lived out one of the themes of the late sixties: "If you've got it, flaunt it...
...America, by contrast, has placed its bets on a modernity so thoroughgoing that individuals are almost as mobile as the cash flow that drives our economy...
...Campbell's message, strikingly congruent with the economics of Reaganism, was "follow your own bliss...
...While the desublimated sixties produced little in the way of compelling art or literature, in the hard-driving eighties, personal computers and the adventurous capitalists, who produced them, reinvested work with the aura of creativity...
...After Abbie Hoffman's suicide, there were earnest testimonies to the man's wit and wisdom...
...What defined the decade culturally, then, was a temporary truce between bourgeois and bohemian individualism as they joined together in a celebration of private life...
...The drugs, the moral gaucheries-"if people only knew what communism really was they'd get down on their knees and beg for it"-were airbrushed out...
Vol. 117 • February 1990 • No. 3
